Abstract
Non-referential functions of language such as setting group boundaries, identity construction and regulation of social proximity have rarely found place in the language technology creation process. Nevertheless, their importance has been postulated in literature. While multiple methods to include social information in large language models (LLM) cover group properties (gender, age, geographic relations, professional characteristics), a combination of group social characteristics and individual features of an agent (natural or artificial) play a role in social interaction but have not been studied in generated language. This article explores the orchestration of prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation techniques to linguistic features of social proximity and distance in language generated by an LLM. The study uses the immediacy/distance model from literature to analyse language generated by an LLM for different recipients. This research reveals that kinship terms are almost the only way of displaying immediacy in LLM-made conversations.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.teicai-1.6
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 1st Worskhop on Towards Ethical and Inclusive Conversational AI: Language Attitudes, Linguistic Diversity, and Language Rights (TEICAI 2024)
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- St Julians, Malta
- Editors:
- Nina Hosseini-Kivanani, Sviatlana Höhn, Dimitra Anastasiou, Bettina Migge, Angela Soltan, Doris Dippold, Ekaterina Kamlovskaya, Fred Philippy
- Venues:
- TEICAI | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 36–41
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.teicai-1.6
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Sviatlana Höhn. 2024. Non-Referential Functions of Language in Social Agents: The Case of Social Proximity. In Proceedings of the 1st Worskhop on Towards Ethical and Inclusive Conversational AI: Language Attitudes, Linguistic Diversity, and Language Rights (TEICAI 2024), pages 36–41, St Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Non-Referential Functions of Language in Social Agents: The Case of Social Proximity (Höhn, TEICAI-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.teicai-1.6.pdf